14 DAY TRIAL // While the search market is relatively stable, there are some trends that seem to be accelerating. While Google's lead in search won't be disputed for quite some time, Bing is making some progress slowly snatching away some market share.
Google Slowly Losing Ground as Bing-Powered Search Gets over 30 percent. In fact, according to Experian Hitwise data, Bing-powered search, aka Bing and Yahoo, in the US managed to inch past the 30 percent market share mark in February.
"Google accounted for 64.42 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending April 2, 2011. Bing-powered search comprised 30.01 percent of searche respectively. The remaining 69 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis report accounted for 5.58 percent of U.S. searches," Hitwise announced.
Google's share of US searches dropped from 66.69 percent in the first month of 2011 to 64.42 percent in the following month, a three percent decrease.
This while Bing went from 14.99 percent to 15.69 percent and Yahoo from 13.49 percent to 14.32 percent. Overall, Bing-powered search market share grew by five percent.
It's certainly an interesting development and this wasn't an one-month fluke, this trend has been carrying on for months now, with Google slowly losing ground to Bing, though February was the biggest jump of recent months.
But it's probably not the time to worry for Google, it's very unlikely that the trend will continue at this rate to the point where Google's supremacy is threatened. Microsoft knows it has a long battle ahead if indeed it plans to challenge Google.
And Google won't be going down without a fight if it really feels threatened. In fact, will all the pressure from government bodies over monopoly issues, showing that the search market is alive and kicking can only bode well for Google, as long as it maintains its big lead.